…and I’m blowing back to the Robin Of Sherwood convention next weekend!

Big thanks to organisers Les and Sue who have kindly allowed me to wander down to Nottingham next Saturday to meet all the friends I made at Legend 2006, and to shamble onstage to do a few readings from the Robin Of Sherwood chapter of Wiffle. I’m now frantically wondering whether I’ve got the guts to go there and reveal that Mark “Nasir” Ryan’s transatlantic phone message last time around made me cry… knowing full well that he’s there in person this year!

I blame it on the white wine.

I’m also torn as to whether to take The Curse-d Dolls with me. As regular blog-readers (both of you) will know, these little woollen terrors have blighted my life with their double-stitched evil ever since I drunkenly bought them at 2006’s charity auction. I might just take Nasir, providing I can find a lead-lined casket to keep him in.

But the biggest dilemma of all is… do I do it in my Friar Tuck outfit?

Blimey, it’s hot! I was in Darlington this afternoon, and it was like striding around the sun-baked deserts of Tatooine. Which is odd, as last week it was more like the ice planet of Hoth. Although I notice tomorrow is forecast to be eerily reminscent of the rain-swept water world P’Ssingdown. The secret rebel base that Princess Leia never mentions very much.

And why was I in Darlington? The world singularly fails to ask. But I’ll tell you anyway… I’ve been asked by the nice people at Darlington Library to be their official author (as opposed to all the maverick, unofficial authors out there – bloody cowboys) for the National Year Of Reading. Yay! So thanks to Jeannie and James for making me coffee and being very pleasant to me – looks like I’ll be doing a few readings and workshops and things over there in the next few months.

The meeting also contained the bizarre following conversation:

James: Did you cover the Discworld Convention in 2006?
Me: Yes. Why, are you a fan?
James: Oh yes. I was head of the Priest’s Guild. I conducted the Church Of Om service on the Sunday morning.

It’s a small world, and – in this case – it’s also flat and on the back of a bloody big turtle.

I also popped into Darlington Arts Centre while I was there and got a couple of tickets to see Dean Haglund. Yep, Langley of the Lone Gunmen, the lank-haired conspiracy theorist in all nine series of The X Files. He’s doing his improv comedy X Files show on Saturday night, and I can’t wait to meet him and get my DVDs signed.

Hello all… sorry for the little break in transmission, real life intervened for a brief spell. Boooooo!

I’ve had a first review! Sort of. Yesterday morning, a copy of the trade magazine The Bookseller arrived, and they’ve picked out Wiffle Lever To Full! as their “Top Title” in the humour section of their new titles, describing it as a “highly entertaining field report-cum-misty-eyed childhood memoir about the weird parallel universe that is the SF, cult TV and film conventions”.

Which is nice. I’m facing up to these things with a mixture of anticipation and utter terror, though. I’ve never done anything in my life before worthy of being officially “reviewed”, and I’m not sure whether to duck and cover when these things start appearing. I like to think I’m a bluff old cove who can laugh off criticism, but I’m a sensitive soul at heart. I get paranoid if someone laughs at my trousers (which has happened so often that I should really be used to it by now).

I’ve also noticed a couple of people seemingly concerned that the book might be a merciless mickey-take of sci-fi fans and the way they act at conventions. Which I’m kind of keen to address, really. Yes, the book’s meant to be funny, and as such it does have some stories of delightfully eccentric behaviour and oddness at these conventions. And such behaviour often comes from myself.

But what I was really keen to avoid (and I hope I have) is a kind of “pointing at the geeks” exercise. I haven’t written this book as an outsider’s perspective on fandom, I wrote it from the point of view of someone who was going to these conventions anyway, as a fan. I genuinely love all of the TV shows and films that I covered, and didn’t go into them all with the outright intention of writing a book. That idea gestated as I went to more and more events, and I only started writing and looking for a publisher once the whole trip was done and dusted. So while there’s a lot of humour and eccentricity in there, I hope it’s seen to have all the affection that I intended, rather than anything more cynical.

I like to think that most fans have a sense of humour about the things that they do, and in fact I’ve even been contacted by one Robin Of Sherwood fan who was keen that I made them look like “a PROPER bunch of weirdos” rather than trying to dress things up nicely! Although, ironically, most of the fans I met at the Robin Of Sherwood convention were dressed up nicely, usually in medieval wench’s costumes or nuns’ habits.

Had a bit of a Wiffle-intensive day today. My Hodder correspondant Heather called this morning to chat about the final adjustments to the book before it goes off to the printers, and we were on the phone for two hours discussing whether the comma on line 4 of page 136 should actually be a hyphen, and whether “The Doctor” should be “the Doctor” without the capital “T”, and if that still applies when you chuck a number into the equation like “the Sixth Doctor”. It’s actually the longest continuous conversation I’ve ever had without the aid of artificial stimulants, and embarrassingly I had to break off halfway through to go for a wee. I put the phone down first, though.

And then Henry from publicity called to discuss Important Things like “How do we make people who don’t want to buy your book buy it”, and we decided the best policy was for me just to never refuse any single opportunity for free press. So apologies in advance if you soon get utterly sick of the sight of my fat face clogging up otherwise perfectly fine newspaper pages, or my grumbly Northern voice chuntering on over various airwaves. Still, as Lionel Blair once said to me as I lit his cigarette on the balcony of Durham Gala Theatre, “Never turn anything down Bob, and you’ll stay in work for the rest of your life”.

True that, I also bought him a large scotch and talked a little about the day he spent in 1964 working on A Hard Day’s Night. The film that is, not the album. He doesn’t play the castanets on Can’t Buy Me Love or anything like that. He was lovely, though.

And then I ate bangers and mash with my girlfriend while we watched The One Show. She offered me some brown sauce. I didn’t turn it down. Lionel would have been proud of me.

Well, I’m back! I had an amazing weekend, met some absolute fruitcakes, and split my wellies on the banks of a lake, but I’m not saying any more than that. Although it’s worth storing the phrase “The Hedgehog Machine” in the back of your mind and seeing if it crops up anywhere in any future scribblings of mine…

Ah, the enigma…

Anyway, back to normal duties today – I’ve had some very nice messages over the weekend from Robin Of Sherwood fans who seem to have discovered ‘Wiffle’, and one from a nice woman in Canada who reckoned I was her new hero! Which isn’t recommended, I’ll only let you down. There’s nothing very heroic about me, especially in the mornings.

And in other news, ‘Wiffle Lever To Full!’ has popped up for pre-order on Play.com, although we’re currently trying to persuade them that I’m not called ‘Bobby Fischer’ and bear no relation to deceased Chess Grand Masters.

So come on then, let’s have your guesses as to what ‘The Hedgehog Machine’ actually is…

Just to apologise in advance that I’ll be missing from the surface of the Blogsphere for a few days, as I’m off on a secret mission and a dangerous quest that might yet provide the germ of the basis of an idea for another book… but, as always, I’ll play these things by ear.

It does involve me travelling to another country and confronting a long-buried mortal fear of mine, but that’s all I’m prepared to say! I’m really excited, though. It’ll be good to get the scent of travel (mainly Monster Munch and Caramel Kit-Kats) back in my nostrils.

I’m not back until late Sunday night, so I’ll see you all then. In the meantime, keep this place nice and tidy, and if you have friends around then make sure they behave themselves and don’t throw up in the March archives.